ChasNote

At least twice a week I hear some variation of this question: “Gee, that conversational-marketing stuff is cool, but how does it scale?”

HP’s computer-skin design contest offers one answer. Back in September HP put out a call to artists who’d be interested in designing a notebook “skin” for an HP Pavillion, and 8,500 creations were submitted. HP then featured the winning design (by Joao Oliverira) in print ads to take the “Computer Is Personal Again” message to a significantly larger audience. Here it is, ripped from July’s issue of Wired:

Other examples: BMW, Dell, Haagen-Dazs and Intel sponsored Graffiti contests in Facebook.

Here’s a sampler of entries in the contest.

Graffiti, the popular Facebook drawing app, adds a new feature today with help from Intel’s sponsorship dollars. When you see a Graffiti you like, you can embed the animated version — the artist’s virtual brush strokes as he or she draws the image — into your own site, just like you’d embed a YouTube video.

Here’s one I like from the recent Haagen-Dazs sponsored bee drawing contest by Priya S Patel: